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A review by dzengota
The Masterpiece by Émile Zola
2.0
Zola has such a struggling variance to his books. He wants (as does his surrogate Sandoz in this book) to genuinely depict a time and place; the effects of the environment on people. In books like Germinal that pulls all of the characters into a inevitable and tragic drama. In The Masterpiece it is watching the slow fall of artists whose visions have come at the wrong time for personal success.
The different artists occasionally have genius monologues that absolutely enrapturing. My personal favorite being a successful and revered artist lamenting the fact that he and everyone knows that he has already painted his masterpiece and that he basically no choice but to fail to live up to expectations or fade into obscurity, "...If only we had the courage the hang ourselves in front of our final masterpieces."
What softens the efficacy of the Masterpiece is its pacing. It takes place over many years, a couple decades even. Whenever a time skip happens in the book (and sometimes they happen multiple times in one chapter), you can expect to go through all of the supporting cast of characters and have them catch the reader up on what has happened in the interim. This creates a mood of so much happening "off-screen", like what you're reading is never quite the core of what the book is really about.
The different artists occasionally have genius monologues that absolutely enrapturing. My personal favorite being a successful and revered artist lamenting the fact that he and everyone knows that he has already painted his masterpiece and that he basically no choice but to fail to live up to expectations or fade into obscurity, "...If only we had the courage the hang ourselves in front of our final masterpieces."
What softens the efficacy of the Masterpiece is its pacing. It takes place over many years, a couple decades even. Whenever a time skip happens in the book (and sometimes they happen multiple times in one chapter), you can expect to go through all of the supporting cast of characters and have them catch the reader up on what has happened in the interim. This creates a mood of so much happening "off-screen", like what you're reading is never quite the core of what the book is really about.